The internet is full of sleuths who will jump at any opportunity to solve a mystery. Never underestimate the power of someone who knows Google Maps like the back of their hand, has an amazing eye for catching the tiniest details, and who has too much free time.
But unfortunately, even the most skilled at-home detectives can’t crack every code. So the internet is still full of mysteries, some of which are extremely unsettling… Netizens have recently been recalling the creepiest unsolved internet mysteries that we may never find the answers to. Enjoy putting on your detective cap and reading through these stories that might give you the heebie-jeebies, and be sure to upvote the ones that you have your own theories about!
#1
The A858 subreddit. someone posted giant blocks of encrypted data every single day for like 4 years and nobody ever cracked what any of it meant. then it just went private one day and that was it. no idea who was behind it or what the point was.
Image source: Adept_Cat_8968, Mika Baumeister
#2
Cicada 3301.
An image got posted on 4chan looking for “highly intelligent individuals,” that linked to series of puzzles which quickly escalated into ciphers, steganography, hidden websites, and even phone numbers that you could call up for clues. There was even QR code posters that appeared in cities all over the world.
People solved parts of it, but nobody has ever seemed to prove who was behind it or what they were recruiting for.
Image source: someone_somewear
#3
The story of the Jack Froese emails is chilling.. After a man passed away in 2011, his friends started receiving emails from his personal account, some of which referenced private, in-person conversations that nobody else could have known. It was never explained.
Image source: minniecue, CHUTTERSNAP
#4
Lake City Quiet Pills.
Lake City Quiet Pills. In 2009, a legendary Reddit user named ReligionOfPeace passed away, and when users dug into his post history, they found hidden HTML code on his image-hosting site. The hidden data contained encrypted text, strange military-style logs, and what looked like job postings for localized “package delivery” operations across international borders, with the tagline referencing “quiet pills” as slang for bullets.
To this day, nobody knows if the entire thing was an incredibly elaborate, years-long alternate reality game, or if Reddit accidentally stumbled onto a front for a real-world mercenary ring operating in plain sight.
Image source: BraveMidnight, Chris Ried
#5
Rach S on YouTube from Jaw Surgery | Regrets
Just a girl who decided to vlog her experience getting jaw surgery through youtube uploads. She started out really upbeat and excited, yet ultimately ended up disappointed with the results – there was a noticeable change in her facial features and her mouth and teeth appeared off-center. She never revealed her doctor but people figured out he was Dr. Todd Hanna.
After the Regrets video she was having a tough time and said she’d update later, never to be seen nor heard from again.
Then the doctor copywrite struck her videos and had them taken down. The videos reappeared about a month later. Around the same time Rach’s jaw surgery results photos were removed from Dr Hanna’s facebook and instagram.
People have speculated in the comments of her videos that she may have passed away, with some commenters going so far as to outright state that she took her life or passed during revision surgery but nothing has been proven.
Image source: o_wat, yaser mobarakabadi
#6
11B-X-1371.
In 2015 a video appeared on YouTube with zero context. No description. No channel history. Just uploaded and left there.
The video shows a figure in darkness wearing a plague doctor mask. Distorted visuals. A horrible high-pitched noise throughout.
People analysed it and found hidden Morse code in the audio. They decoded it — GPS coordinates. A location in Poland.
Then they found hidden images in the audio spectrogram. When you convert the sound to visual, faces appear. A woman. Distorted. Looking directly at you.
Then binary code in the video frames. Decoded to an IP address.
The Morse code also spelled: *”You are already [not alive].”*
Nobody ever identified who made it. The account vanished. No one claimed it.
Either it was an ARG puzzle that was never finished. Or it wasn’t a game at all.
Image source: satty98
#7
The Markovian Parallax Denigrate. Random gibberish post that appeared across usenet in 1996, thousands of accounts, no explanation ever found, nobody knows what it was or who sent it. just vanished. it predates most internet culture and still has no answer.
Image source: HeatherMillerWave, Resource Database
#8
There is a YouTube channel called Shoe Shine with Kat. She would go to shoeshiners in Mexico City, get them to talk about how they started, etc. super ASMR stuff. Then she just stopped posting and disappeared. People have asked the local shoe shiners if they had seen her but no one has. Just gone.
Image source: Zamboniqueen, ShoeShinewithKat
#9
That one mukbanger who was filmed forcefully to eat food on camera there was someone behind the camera would talk sometimes they’d say eat faster or hurry up she doesn’t upload videos anymore.
Image source: Old-City-8753, JJ ROCHA
#10
Two things come to mind –
1. A woman posted that she found a ziplock bag of IDs and drivers liscneces in her husband’s things. All of them young women if I remember correctly. Just randomly there. She posted on reddit asking what to do, never heard back from her. She planned to maybe confront her husband about it.
2. A different woman, recently married and pregnant. Her husband’s mother didn’t survive giving birth to him, and him and his father were set on that she would also pass away during the birth. Nothing could convince them otherwise, no talking, no therapy, no doctors confirming the wife was absolutely healthy. She was quite far along in the pregnancy and the husband made her clear out her wardrobe and bag her things and everything in anticipation of her demise, even making funeral plans etc. Super weird. There was no update from her either.
Image source: StormFront93, Christian Bowen
#11
There was someone that posted on Reddit years ago, I don’t remember which sub it was, but there was this person that woke up one day to tons of missed calls and voicemails asking about buying their house. It turned out their house had been posted on a real estate website, claiming the previous owners had passed away. The poster later woke up one morning to discover animal blood on a window. They never posted another update.
Image source: Toastghost1, mohdizzuanbinroslan
#12
I was just reading a comment under this post from someone about ‘ghost profiles’ and how old accounts are ‘waking up’ suddenly and coming on at the same time of day to have normal conversations. I then go to comment and the user that made the comment was suddenly banned, the person’s comment was only from around 30 minutes ago. That felt creepy to me anyway lmao….
Image source: bdean66, Curated Lifestyle
#13
Some guy on 4chan posted photos of some weird cave his grandpa dug under his house with face carvings and stone crosses and a couple suspicious-looking bones. The thread got deleted before he could share too much info.
Image source: 1stEmissaryElenwen
#14
‘Grave Robbing for Morons’. No one knows who the guy in the video is or even who the camera man is.
Image source: TheHappyPoro
#15
That urban explorer who found the vat of decomposing bodies in China. There’s definitely debate on whether it’s real or not, and I’m a wimp so I’ve never watched the video therefore I have no opinion.
Image source: AnalogyAddiction
#16
That story posted by a redditor about how his wife refused to let him go upstairs, to the point she set up security cameras etc.
Many people theorized she was a cam girl, had an illicit grow operation, was breeding illegal animals, or just that it was typical fake story to rage bate engagement.
Image source: sweetdawg99
#17
Ghostnet.
Government, industrial, corporate, and media computer systems in over 100 countries have been infiltrated and compromised by a single large-scale cyber espionage group. An investigation by Canadian cybersecurity researchers points to it being a state sponsored organisation controlled by IPs in Hainan, China where the Chinese military has a large SIGINT facility.
Whoever is behind it has successfully attacked other government networks such as the forcing the official Canadian financial department offline. Targets also include the Tibetan government in exile, Dalai Lama; embassies of India, South Korea, Germany, Pakistan, Romania, and more; and the foreign ministries of Latvia, Philippines, Indonesia, Bangladesh, and more. .
Image source: CvieYltidrekoof
#18
I think it was debunked as a hoax at some point but the Snapchat Intruder story is one of the only things that has genuinely scared me in terms of internet oddities.
Basically a guy staying at his parent’s house records a snapchat video showing off his pet birds when the person he sends it to says something like “what was that in the background?” and you can see what looks like a person pressing their hands against a window at one point in the video.
Later, he hears strange noises late at night and goes to investigate while filming. He finds nothing but at one point in the video he walks through an unlit room and very *very* faintly, like basically invisible unless you turn the brightness up, there’s this… *mass* in the corner. Like a guy in all black standing there but he’s huge. The cameraman doesn’t notice it at the time but he goes back into the room during the day and it’s obvious that the figure wasn’t something that belonged in the room.
So what was it? The obvious answer is someone was casing out the house in the first clip then the second clip was them breaking in, making some noise, then hiding in the corner when the cameraman goes to investigate, but apparently nothing was stolen so why was the figure there? The lack of obvious motive is scary as hell.
Just thinking about that video gives me chills. It occasionally pops into my head when I’m walking around my house in the dark and I suddenly need to turn the lights on lol.
Image source: Vavavavaxon7
#19
The ‘this man’ thing from 2008 — where hundreds of people on different forums insisted they’d dreamt about the exact same face. turns out it was marketing for a horror movie, but the fact that the forums predated the marketing and the descriptions were eerily consistent still bugs me.
Image source: jesscatfancy
#20
The Content: A mysterious YouTube channel that uploaded hundreds of thousands of brief, bizarre videos featuring single, abstract pixelated shapes against solid backgrounds.
Image source: Safe_Outside5666
#21
I went to AusCERT conferences back in the day. I remember seeing a presentation by I think a Canadian guy, maybe 2005 or 2006.
He was tracking usage of the nmap tool. It can scan which services are available on Internet hosts. Technical people use it all the time for good and evil purposes. He had three dimensional graphs showing numbers of hosts vs. number of services scanned worldwide. And that had beautiful smooth curves from millions of scans. Except…
One had a weird short bump when a certain type of scan went through the roof. And that stood out, because it was a day before the Code Red virus hit and everything went fubar.
It was a mystery, with no logical connection, but he kept looking. And he found similar bumps for every major virus incident he had records for. Almost every time, there was a short burst of activity, all around the world. Like somebody knew.
I don’t know what’s happened since. But his data was compelling, and he knew how to tell a story.
Image source: jedburghofficial
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